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ADSC to research mass transportation system networks, urban noise

Jun 24, 2015 Katie Carr, ADSC

ADSC Illinois at Singapore recently received two new grants from Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF). The projects are all collaborations with fellow Singapore research institutes, universities and companies.

ADSC will be working in collaboration with the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) on a project that focuses on safeguarding urban transportation systems against cyber-attacks. The NRF-funded project is titled “SecUTS: A Cyber-Physical Approach to Securing Urban Transportation Systems.” This project will take a multi-faceted approach to designing models and security mechanisms to capture and defend against attacks. Illinois faculty members Yih-Chun Hu, Douglas Jones, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, David Nicol and Bill Sanders, along with ADSC’s David Yau, will be contributing to the project. The team will also be collaborating with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

The project will focus on rail systems such as Singapore’s mass rapid transit system. As those systems become increasingly complex, existing security technologies have become inadequate because of the cyber-physical nature of the systems, as well as the involvement of humans in the systems. The security models that the researchers will be developing include defense measures for older and current systems, the timeliness and availability of communications and adaptive strategies for mitigating attacks.

This work is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore, under its National Cybersecurity R&D Programme (Award No. NRF2014NCR-NCR001-31) and administered by the National Cybersecurity R&D Directorate.

The second grant received under the Land and Liveability Innovation Challenge (L2 NIC) by NRF is titled “Abating Traffic Noise Through a Holistic Approach of Noise Monitoring, Analytics and Control (MAC)”, which aims to provide insights into how to mitigate noise in urban areas.

To achieve a good noise-control scheme, there is a need to understand the type of noise faced by residents and also to appreciate human perception of noise, which can be subjective. Researchers are capturing local noises by mounting an array of microphones on a moving vehicle and will use the information to develop a noise map of parts of Singapore. Researchers at I2R will develop a noise database for Singapore and study human perception of different types of urban noises using the developed database.

This information can then be programmed into the memory of the noise controller to intelligently generate the best anti-noise wavefront by masking sounds and turning annoying noises into something less aggravating for residents. ADSC Principal Investigator Doug Jones is collaborating with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), as well as with the University of Southampton (UK), Panasonic (Singapore), Tottori University (Japan), LTA, NEA and I2R on the project.

This project is based on research/work supported by the Singapore Ministry of National Development and National Research Foundation under the L2 NIC Award No. L2NICCFP1-2013-7.